The Gatekeeper Read online

  “The Gatekeeper is a marvellous blend of home comforts and pains, and the strange treasures of other realms. It’s a skilled writer indeed who can make fantasy sing with so much real-world truth and delight.”

  —Jen Crawford, Assistant Professor, University of Canberra

  “I love how Nuraliah has created this imagined but totally plausible world which is both strange yet familiar. An impressive piece of writing— confident and effortless.”

  —Haresh Sharma, Resident Playwright, The Necessary Stage

  “A great Singaporean and politicised twist on an old myth with a moving— even romantic—storyline.”

  —Cyril Wong, author of Ten Things My Father Never Taught Me

  ALSO FROM THE EPIGRAM BOOKS FICTION PRIZE

  FINALISTS

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  Surrogate Protocol by Tham Cheng-E

  State of Emergency by Jeremy Tiang

  2015

  Now That It’s Over by O Thiam Chin (winner)

  Sugarbread by Balli Kaur Jaswal

  Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! by Sebastian Sim

  Death of a Perm Sec by Wong Souk Yee

  Annabelle Thong by Imran Hashim

  Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam

  Altered Straits by Kevin Martens Wong

  Copyright © 2017 by Nuraliah Norasid

  Cover Illustration by Yong Wen Yeu

  All rights reserved

  Published in Singapore by Epigram Books

  www.epigrambooks.sg

  Published with the support of

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  NATIONAL LIBRARY BOARD, SINGAPORE CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAME: Nuraliah Norasid, 1986-

  TITLE: The Gatekeeper / Nuraliah Norasid.

  DESCRIPTION: Singapore : Epigram Books, 2017.

  IDENTIFIERS: OCN 973573219

  ISBN: 978-981-17-0090-3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-981-17-0096-5 (ebook)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: Medusa (Greek mythology)—Fiction. Marginality, Social—Fiction.

  CLASSIFICATION: DDC S823—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  * * *

  FIRST EDITION: March 2017

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my Mama who has survived so much

  and looks set to survive still more.

  ria I: gembira, girang, riang, sukacita

  (Translation: happy, cheerful, carefree)

  —from Kamus Dewan: edisi keempat

  What is life’s greatest illusion?

  Innocence, my brother.

  —Dawnstar Sanctuary riddle from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

  And to this day, Minerva, to dismay and terrify her foes, wears on her breast the very snakes that she herself had set— as punishment—upon Medusa’s head.

  —from Book IV of Ovid’s The Metamorphoses

  The interrogator switched languages. “Ria, you like to story, yah? Tell lah. Tell us,” she urged.

  No clipped, controlled tones of a second tongue, learnt in schools. They were done with objectives, done with questions of what Ria did and why she had done it. They knew hurting her, only to receive silence in return, was not going to work. So they’d changed the interrogator to this one who spoke with familiarity: using Sce’ ‘dal, the lingua franca of the Layeptic region, instead of the colonial born Ro’ ‘dal; breaking words, shortening sentences, barely obeying the laws of grammar.

  In the light-hearted music of the new interrogator’s voice was the indulgence and comfort of a glutinous rice and coconut milk dessert. Ria could almost forget the tight cap suffocating her hair, the immobility of her clamped-down limbs, and the collar that was fitted just tight enough to remind her where she was every time she swallowed.

  She’d pissed herself a few times and had been constipated for days. She could not see, for her eyes, too—her eyes especially—were bound. Judging from the hollow ring of the space, she guessed that she was in a too-large room with an ominously high ceiling.

  “Tell lah,” the interrogator said again. In colloquial Sce’ ‘dal, the word cerita, for “story”, was shortened into c’ita, “create”.

  Ria smiled, lips cracking. To tell—no, create—a story like hers, was to tell of regrets from first beginnings, perhaps even when the country was called by a Tuyunri name that linguists could only transliterate as Ma(an) TisCera—The Land(of) SkyHills.

  And what a peopled land it was.

  Early records called the scaly, reptilian Scereans the “dragons of the waters” and the first book written about the pre-Human history of the land spoke of them as if they were devil spawn. Back then, most of them had inverted knees and leg spurs, and long snouts filled with sharp teeth that they used to snap up fish in the Su(ma) Uk’rh, or Lower Marshlands, where the soft ground ate boots and plant and animal-life ate everything else. It was a time when everyone kept to their dwellings and settlements: the Scereans in the northeastern side of the island country, near Su(ma) whence they came; the agile, cat-like Feleenese to the northwest where they fought wars with their canine Cayanese neighbours for control of the fertile land around the Anur Delta. The river systems ensued from a convergence of the clear streams within the land’s rainforest centre. Ma(an) TisCera’s first inhabitants, the Tuyuns, existed to and past their decline there, atop mouldering, ancestral ruins. The Tuyuns were almost Human-looking, but they wore scales of tur and yun—rock and wood—upon their skins, so that they might camouflage into the land that was theirs by right of precedence.

  The Humans only arrived much later, coming from lands high up in the north and far west across the seas, though they were quick to take things for their own. No one noticed the pig-fleshed things in their villages, or how their centre in Krow City grew as time went by, forcing the other races into tight, defenceless corners. But in no time their arrivals were forgotten and it was as if they had always been there: raising buildings, laying down pipes, making laws and governments, and getting things done the way they saw fit.

  When the country was populated enough and important enough in the larger scheme of dinya—the world—someone declared its birth as if it had never been there before. The country was later named “Manticura”, for a poisonous flying Human-headed lion made for a much stronger symbol than disappearing skies and deflating hills inhabited by savages.

  Scerean (me-tura). In official Manticurean records, that was what Ria would be named, though her being was more than a composite image of a snake and a woman.

  Ria had only seen herself in reflection once. Her widely-set, slanted orange eyes with their starved pupils and her flat nose made her more Scerean than Human. And yet, the oily black serpent coils falling to her shoulders made sure all of that didn’t matter.

  Once again: “Tell lah.”

  Ria conjured for her listener a memory of rustling undergrowth and a lone attap hut on stilts in a small jungle clearing. Chickens pecked in the courtyard dirt and in the shaded kolong beneath the hut. A few times she had darted in among them from behind the moss-covered roots of a meranti tree, dragging cans strung on a length of white twine, to watch them scatter in a flurry of clucks, wing beats and feathers.

  Sometimes her Nenek, grey hair in a snail knot, sat on the short flight of steps that led up to the veranda, chewing on her sireh while she watched Ria play. Sometimes Nenek wore her baju opah; most times, Nenek wore only her sarong, hitched up high over her freckled and wrinkled breasts, her ankles skinny and her veins tracing bulging courses across the tops of her bare, rough-soled feet.

  Barani never watched
, but when Ria did something wrong, her sister was always there, waiting just inside the veranda and frowning at the top of the steps. Tall Barani, with her serious eyes like brilliant purple stones, her pupils tiny triple knots and the slight jut of cheekbones that seemed to trace their way to her full lips; different, beautiful—“Enchanting,” as Nenek pointed out to Ria once.

  Ria had none of that beauty. All Ria had were the laughter and smiles, and the silent feet that let her creep about the kolong unnoticed, above which Barani could be heard screeching, “Ria! Where are you, you little devil? Come inside now!”

  To be quiet, Ria would have a hand pressed over her mouth, cupped to keep her voice in as her sister screamed again:

  “Ria!”

  Then, Ria, who was named for old, forgotten joy, would open her hand and let her laughter ring out for all nearby to hear.

  It was joy that Eedric tried to remember, as the hours, perhaps even days, in lockup started to feel like months. He sat in a large crowded cell, caged in by bars with white paint peeling off, revealing grey metal in places. The dark walls were nothing but ravaged, windowless expansions of those bars, keeping him packed in with the other men awaiting second judgment.

  He leaned his head back and glanced about at the other occupants of the cell. They were a threatening mixture of almost every non-Human race that existed on Manticura, reeking aggression and menace as they squatted or stood clustered in their groups. One man was taking a piss in the far corner, either oblivious to the guard banging the bars with his truncheon, or deliberately ignoring him. Behind the man, two others—a midnight-coated Cayanese and a Tuyun, his grey, rock-like tur scales rough and scratched, the row of spikes along his arms blunted—were going at it, their foreheads mashed together as they argued, their respective hodgepodge band of “members” adding to the cacophony with trash talk.

  Eedric didn’t see how it would be a fair fight, because the Cayanese, like all of his kind, was a hulking figure, twice the Tuyun’s size. Granted, he was not a pure-blooded Cayanese. There was a Human face seamed into his canine features: his brown eyes large, furry brows drawn low; nose protruding and pert though not like a snout, beneath which his mouth was drawn into a tight line. Eedric saw how, within offspring of mixed blood, the Human bits always struggled to be present amongst those of the anir, or for want of better a Ro’ ‘dal word, the “creature”.

  The midnight Cayanese’s ears were perked into tall triangles. A mane of grey, darker than the rest of him, swept back from around them and down to where his chest began. His legs grew straight down to flat Human feet with small toes, which were quite likely the only Human parts of him that managed to really assert themselves.

  A group of Feleenese men sat against an adjacent wall near Eedric. They watched the fight with disinterest. They wore their shirts with the sleeves rolled up high on their upper arms and Eedric noticed the matching triangle of spirals burnt into their short brown fur. One of them saw Eedric watching and shot him a look, calm yet confrontational. Eedric turned away, to the austere, white walls of the corridor outside.

  So far none of them had picked on Eedric yet. Strange, seeing how his was the only Human-looking form in the room.

  Perhaps the whispers had got around about what he really was: a Human-minora (survivalist); meaning “minor Human”, signalling a mixing of blood, that last bit tacked on like a warning or an insult. And no one was desperate, angry or bored enough to provoke him into a fight. He wouldn’t have minded though. It would certainly beat waiting about for a verdict, or for a next-of-kin to care enough to bail you out. Occasionally, a guard came around to open the gate and announce a name, and Eedric would watch the person depart to a rapacious display of spread arms and small cheers, as if freedom was around the corner rather than prosecution and punishment.

  He closed his eyes and let his mind wander to a certain medusa. Ria, with her name like smiles freely given, and her half-moon eyes the colour of the sky at sunrise. He recreated his mental image of her with the single-minded purpose of remembering only the best of her in quiet hours. He could forget the reek of urine around him and smell instead the salty musk of the valley between her breasts, the fullness of them in his hands; the valley that began the invisible line down her stomach, to the pubic triangle wedged between warm thighs, which sloped to perfect knees. Her laugh had its own characteristic timbre, resonating in his head long after the last note had floated away in conversation. He thought of the two moles on the left side of her face—the one in the corner of her lips, a hint away from the dimple that appeared when she smiled, and the bigger one at the corner of her eye, bisected by her ragged scar. The snakes that frequently touched her face on the side with the moles seemed to have a single white mark on the backs of their heads, as if in a conscious effort to match.

  He got to thinking of the way her hair was attached to her head: not like hair with roots, but extensions of her skin, growing out into each serpent body. The scales were sparse where the strand began at her scalp, closing up into tight patterns, nearly imperceptible in the uniform green-sheened black over the whole of the visible creature.

  How did one explain what seemed like a lifetime of presence? It struck him that she could have been there, all that time: the mother by his bedside, his first love from days of innocent youth, a remembered act of kindness and—at the same time—of complete and utter cruelty.

  In spite of his best efforts, every one of her faces in the album of his mind—in laughing moments, and in the sad and distant ones—were sombre black-and-white snapshots, her eyes averted just a little so as to not dazzle and petrify. It was not memory, not really. It was the desperate creation of one from the star bursts of joy that her presence had once brought him as the pain of her recent betrayal threatened to flood over him once again.

  5064–5068 CE

  Wash Feet

  Ria raced past the earthen container with its wooden cover, up the steps and onto the veranda before entering the house to sit across from Barani and Nenek at the woven tikar. She held out her enamel green plate to her sister. Barani did not even give it a glance, scowling at Ria’s feet instead. Ria looked. They were dusty from the outside. Something was stuck to the sole and in between her toes. Might be a leaf, or a squashed fruit; as long as no smell, Ria figured and took a sniff just to check.

  Holding the rice spoon high above the steaming pot, Barani admonished Ria with a loud, “Kan dirty!” extending the last syllable until she sounded like an annoying trilling bird.

  When Ria didn’t move to wash her feet, Barani went around the tikar and took the younger girl by the ear and forced her to stand. Ignoring the violent, protesting hisses from Ria’s hair, Barani marched her to the container at the bottom of the steps.

  Ria clutched at her tender ear as she scooped water onto her feet. She rubbed the soles against her shins to get rid of the dirt and the unfortunate specimens she had picked up earlier, muttering the entire time—about Barani being a monster, a devil, a no-good busybody. She never saw the logic of this foot-washing regimen. What difference did it make if she were to wash them only right before going to bed? All in one, no trouble. She was only going to get them dirty again anyway, when she had to go out later to get the chickens back into the coop beneath the house and to take in the laundry. Foot-washing was a stupid rule someone had made up— must be Barani who was too lazy to sweep the house. One of those silly bits of nonsense that stated you could do something, but not something else, all for someone’s benefit—must be Barani’s. “This cannot. That cannot. All cannot.”

  Barani shouted at her from the top of the steps, “Eh, what you muttering about?” And she went on—“Just now just come back don’t want to wash, now suka-suka take your time to wash, you think what? Time your mother make is it?”—such that even if Ria wanted to tell Barani what she was mumbling about, she wasn’t given a chance to.

  Nenek always said Barani had a beautiful voice: lemak manis, they called it; coconut milk rich and sweet as sug
ar—like that singer, Salo… Salom… somebody. But right then, Barani’s voice grated on Ria’s ears. Not nice at all.

  Walking damp-footed past Barani, Ria remarked, “Voice not nice tu, be quiet only lah.”

  Barani flared into a new temper and, hitching up her sarong with one hand, snapped her body around. “This child!” she exclaimed. “So insolent already! Come here!” And gave chase.

  Ria, small and lithe, sprinted into the house, screaming with gleeful panic, “Nek! Kakak want to beat Adik, Nek!” Barani was red faced. Her hand was raised. She had taken five unsuccessful swipes at Ria, who had counted.

  Nenek, who liked to begin meals with sireh, was in the process of spitting out her chewed clump of leaf and betel nut into the spittoon by the time Barani got inside and settled back down, seething, beside the elderly woman. Barani spooned rice for Nenek first, who serenely took her plate, before snatching Ria’s out of the girl’s outstretched hands. While she waited, Ria sniffed at the dishes served in their little bowls: cassava leaves cooked in coconut milk, sambal belacan to make it spicy and boiled sweet potatoes for afters. It was rare to be having rice, and rice was always Ria’s favourite.

  Later, Ria would ask for seconds. Barani, scolding, “Later you fat, then you know,” would always give her another helping. Fat or not fat was of no concern to Ria, who was small and so thin everywhere that Nenek had once thought she had stomach worms.

  Everything was routine around the house. Barani and Nenek woke up early every morning to cook and pack lauks, to make kuihs and some shell ornaments for sale. Then, while Nenek trekked to the coastal village to sell their goods, Barani tidied their home, which was the easiest part of the morning. The hardest part was getting Ria to wake up. Often Barani had to grab the girl by the ankles and heave her off the sleeping mat. Ria, still sleeping, protested by lashing out arms and feet at her sister, all the while shouting like she was battling sea monsters in a dream. When she finally woke, it was with her face partly on the mat, partly on the floor, and Barani very close to kicking her out onto the veranda and down to the courtyard where they would have their morning baths.